PERRY ANDERSON
Verso
£30
ISBN 9781804297674
REVIEWED BY
Eoin Dilllon
Eoin Dillon is an independent scholar.
Disputing disaster is Perry Anderson’s account of six historians of the First World War: Frenchman Pierre Renouvin (1893–1974), Italian Luigi Albertini (1871–1941), German Fritz Fischer (1908–99), Englishman Keith Wilson (1944–2018), Australian Christopher Clark (1960–) and American Paul Schroeder (1927–2020). Comparisons are often drawn between now and the era preceding the First World War: a declining great power (UK then/US now); rising rival powers (Germany/Japan then, China now); imperial or hegemonic rivalry (US/China/Russia now). And a quick pen-portrait reveals a striking similarity between two leading players, then and now. Kaiser Wilhelm II, so often the villain of the piece though the most intelligent monarch of the period (not difficult), has also been described as ‘the least balanced or secure, incapable of sustained attention, consistent judgement, or any understanding of himself or others, behind a barrage of bluster he was a jumble of prejudices and phobias, vanities and frivolities, revelling in the limelight’ (US now).
Disputing disaster shifts between the structural and the contingent, long-term and structural causes and the immediate precipitants. Keith Wilson showed that the immediate decisive factor in bringing the UK, and therefore Ireland, into the war was Liberal fear that, were the party to split, a coalition government with the Conservatives would ensue and fight Germany anyway. The German invasion of Belgium was a convenient pretext for many who supported British entry into the war in any case. George Kennan described the First World War as the ‘seminal disaster of the twentieth century’; it still determines, if less consciously than before, popular attitudes to militarised international relations in twenty-first-century Ireland.
Historical parallels should not be overdrawn, but nor should they be ignored. Christopher Clark, by far the best known of Anderson’s subjects, has made a seriously intended comparison between now and the 1840s, a decade that ended in near-European-wide revolution. Speaking of the ‘fissured, multifarious’ politics of 1848, the anxieties about inequality, domestic tumults entangled with foreign affairs, irruptions of violence, utopia and spirituality, and the lack of any definite sense of the future, he concludes his book on Europe in 1848 with the lines, ‘If a revolution is coming (and we seem very far removed from a non-revolutionary solution to the “polycrisis” we currently face) it may look something like 1848: poorly planned, dispersed, patchy and bristling with contradictions’.
Germany’s belated acceptance that it had effectively caused the war and should be held responsible was highly congenial to other former belligerents. Fritz Fischer, revealed posthumously as a Nazi out of not just necessity but also enthusiastic conviction, argued in the 1960s that the Second Reich launched the First World War as a bid for European domination and significant imperial possessions abroad, and had planned for it years in advance. This overturned a German national consensus that went back to the Weimar period that German war guilt, written into the Versailles treaty, lacked any historical foundation. Fischer won the day, winning both public and professional acceptance, and accepting German war guilt became integral to a new German identity cleansed of its past.
For many years there was an established consensus about the causes of the First World War: the victor states held that, though the price was high, it was necessary and the cause just. Clark in The sleepwalkers instead sought to show why the dynamics of a plurality of rival and perhaps antagonistic power structures, the continuous web of interactions between them over both the short and the longer term, could and did lead to war. Paul Schroeder maintained that the Great War was a natural and predictable, though not strictly inevitable, outcome of the international game then being played by almost every power involved—large, middle and small.
Anderson reasserts the centrality of imperialism as the cause of the war, by way of Lenin and Schumpeter, with a reference to J.A. Hobson. This is not the multifaceted empire of most of human history, but specifically the imperialism of Louis Bonaparte and the wave of new colonial annexations by European states in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Lenin’s pamphlet on imperialism is not generally highly regarded, even by some people generally sympathetic to a Marxist reading of history. This, Anderson argues, is because they have read a version designed to pass the censors of Tsarist Russia and have taken competition between big trusts powered by finance capital for monopoly control over outlying markets and raw materials as the driver of imperialist expansion. Rather, Lenin was arguing that a deeper structural feature of capitalism, which long preceded the emergence of trusts, was at work, which converted economic competition between firms into military conflicts between states: that was uneven development. After 1871, Germany grew exponentially faster than Britain, and Japan than Russia. The real test of the strength of a capitalist state is war; under capitalism the even economic growth of individual enterprises, individual states, is impossible. There is nothing else that periodically restores the disturbed equilibrium than crises in industry and wars in politics.